Why Frank Ocean Isn’t on the ‘Django Unchained’ Soundtrack

No amount of wishful thinking can put Frank Ocean on the Django Unchained soundtrack — Quentin Tarantino has made damn sure of that. Last week, SPIN reported the official Django Unchained track listing to the upcoming antebellum opus and noted the conspicuous absence of 2012’s Best Album artist, despite a recent GQ profile that revealed the channel ORANGE singer had composed for the film. Trying to keep the dream alive, we pored over soundtracks of movies past in search of an example of a song that premiered on the big screen despite being left off the OST. And we found one in Radiohead’s “Exit Music (for a Film),” which played over the end credits of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, but wasn’t included on either of two musical releases. Hope! We got lost, lost in the thrill of it all.

Then FUSE had to go and talk to Tarantino himself, for the final word: “Frank Ocean wrote a fantastic ballad that was truly lovely and poetic in every way, there just wasn’t a scene for it,” he said. “I could have thrown it in quickly just to have it, but that’s not why he wrote it and not his intention. So I didn’t want to cheapen his effort. But, the song is fantastic, and when Frank decides to unleash it on the public, they’ll realize it then.”

High praise from the director, an accomplished curator of music in his own right, who also commissioned new songs from John Legend and Rick Ross for the film. Hear the Teflon Don’s spaghetti Western-in-the-trap track “100 Black Coffins” here.